Spring Break 2013 - Day 2: Old Nauvoo

Monday, April 1, 2013

Our 2nd day in Missouri for Spring Break started early Monday morning with us leaving Missouri for Illinois.  We we headed for Nauvoo.  Nauvoo is a special place for Mormons.  It is a town that was settled by Joseph Smith and the early members of our church before they were driven out of the state and eventually settled in Utah.  It has been restored and is now a Mormon tourist destination.  We had so much fun being there with our family.  Above is Meg and Em sleeping on the drive to Nauvoo.  It was FREEZING in Nauvoo.  We braved the cold and had a picnic lunch after we arrived.

After lunch we loaded up for a carriage ride that took us through some of the lesser seen country of Nauvoo and we were able to hear some great spiritual stories about the early inhabitants of the city.

Emily and Meagan shared Uncle Steve H.'s coat the entire day.  We called them Megily.

At the Family Living Center we learned about different daily skills that the early settlers in Nauvoo possessed.   We even got some hands on experience.  Here is Zac making strands of rope.

And here are Reagan and Addy twisting the strands of rope together to make a big rope.

Josh helping take care of Annie.

Zac was carrying Reagan and Addy and Emily and Aubrey decided to hitch a ride.

Then we went on a wagon tour of the town of Old Nauvoo.  They had quilts we could wrap up in. 

 Even with the quilts it was a very chilly ride.

Spencer and Steve realized they committed a major fashion faux pas 

by wearing the same quilt on the wagon ride.

Aubrey, Reagan, Meagan and Addy trying to get warm in the big coat.

We visited the Blacksmith Shop and they gave us all a prairie diamond ring.  

It is a ring made out of a bent diamond brand nail.

Our next stop was the Gunsmith Shop and the John Browning house.  

I had no idea John Browning was a Mormon or that he lived in Nauvoo.

We were able to see the process of old fashioned gun making.

 I thought this was interesting.  The machine gun was invented in Nauvoo.  Who knew?

When the city of Nauvoo was planned,  it was divided into one acre lots for each family/house.  They leave one plot in natural prairie grass to show the size of the lots.  Every spring they burn the plot with the prairie grass to show how fast spreading a prairie fire is and what a threat it was to the early settlers.  We just happened to be there on the day of the burning.

They started the fire on the opposite side of where we were.  By the time it got around to our side we thought, what the heck are we doing way over here by the truck freezing?  That is when we all started making our way toward the fire en masse.  I kid you not, we looked like a bunch of Zombies.  It was a scene straight out of The Walking Dead.

We were a few weeks early for tourist season in Nauvoo so everything closed early.  And there were no restaurants open for the season yet.  I cannot even tell you how difficult it was to find enough food to feed this crew dinner.  It was kinda ridiculous.  I understand most places outside of  Utah not being used to feeding such large families, but, uhhh... we were in Nauvoo.  Who goes there except for Mormons with large families?  Anyway, we checked into our house we were renting for the night and finally found a place that had the capacity to make as many pizzas as we needed and we sent the men folk across the river to pick up the pizza.  The house we were staying in was awesome.  It was only a few miles away from Old Nauvoo and it was right on the Mississippi river.  Here is the view from the deck.

There was a small cabin on the property and these boys slept in it.  

They holed themselves up in there with pizza and snacks and movies.

I think the girls favorite part of the house was this spiral staircase leading up to their bedroom.  This was my least favorite part of the house because the next morning I brushed past it in my skirt and it ripped a hole in it.

See these kids.  They thought they would play an April fools joke on my by changing my facebook  profile picture to a rather disturbing picture of a baby with Mr. Beans head.  They were the last ones up, I have no idea what time they finally went to bed.  It was a fun day.

Spring Break 2013 - Day One: Easter

Sunday, March 31, 2013

We woke up early Easter morning and drove into St. Charles (we are staying in Troy with Steve's sister Heather and her family) to go to church with Steve's dad and sister Lisa and her family at the ward Steve grew up in.  Steve's brother Mike and his family are on Spring Break this week too and they drove in from Kentucky to spend a few days with us while we are here.

After church all the other families went to have lunch at their in-laws for Easter.  Our family and Mike's family went back to Heather's house and had lunch together.  Spencer was an excessive fork ninja as he ate in his new ninja clothes with about 20 forks.

Zac was an excessive mess ninja with his spaghetti eating abilities.

Steve and Heather just moved into a new house in an awesome place with a forest in their back yard.  Zac and Asher were in Heaven.  They spent the remainder of the day outside.

Finally everyone started gathering at Heather's house.  We ate Easter dinner together and just enjoyed each others company.

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The girls loved holding the rabbits

We had a family egg hunt

We got to meet Steve and Heather's foreign exchange student, Mandi.  She is from Beijing.

Emily and Meagan - these girls are crazy together

The Grandsons with Grandpa and Uncle David. And Addy who ran in and jumped into the picture as I was taking it. 

We took a big family picture but I don't have a copy of the real one because we took it with Heather's camera so here is one I took during our set up.  It was a fun day and I am so glad we were able to spend it with family.

Spring Break 2013 - The Drive

 It has been a year and a half since we last made our way to St. Louis.  A few months ago we were trying to decided what we wanted to do for Spring Break.  Our kids have so much fun with their cousins when we are all together.  Like so much fun it is beyond fun.  We actually all have a way super indescribably awesome time when we are all together.  The kids are all getting older.  We have 2 cousins getting married this year.  And 2 graduating from high school next year.  Then after that it will just snowball and we will have kids graduating and getting married and going on missions like crazy.  We realized we only have a short time to get these young'uns together.  So it was settled.  Spring Break in Missouri!  I was excited because every time we go it is in the winter.  I was so looking forward to some warm Missouri weather and a chance to do all the things we never can do when it is so cold.  At the time we decided this, we were experiencing our bajillionth straight day of single digit weather and we had several feet of eternal snow on the ground. Yep.  I've been lookin' forward to this trip for a long time.  Just a few days before our trip, school was canceled in Missouri because of snow....I was not happy.  The weather forecast showed to warming up right before we came and then getting cold and lasting for our entire trip.  

So last Friday as soon as the kids got outta school (Emily didn't want to ruin her perfect attendance) we loaded ourselves into the van and began our journey.  We were leaving the most absolute perfect weather in Utah for the most absolute freezing weather in Missouri.  I was not happy about this whole situation, but I remembered it was not the weather we were going for.  

We stopped for dinner at KFC in Wyoming.  I am still incredibly irritated when I think about what happened in that KFC parking lot.  When we first pulled in and parked, we parked in one of the only open parking spaces, which happened to be next to a parking space filled with the containers and trash from someones dinner.  After we ate, we were sitting in the van getting ready to leave and we had the side van door open waiting for one of the kids to come out of the bathroom.  This incredibly judgmental old man and his wife pulled up in front of us and were talking and motioning to us.  I thought they were trying to tell us that we had a flat tire or our gas tank was open or something.  I told Steve to open his window and see what he was trying to say.  The old dude just pointed to us and then pointed to the trash and waived his hand with a look of incredible disgust on his face and then drove off.  I still didn't get what we was trying to say until Steve said something about the jackdonky thinking that we were the ones who left that trash there.  I was so mad that  someone would think I was trashy enough to sit in a parking lot and empty out all our trash with four kids sitting there.  I seriously told Steve to go follow that rude and judgmental old man so we could tell him that we were not the ones who made that trashy mess.  But we still had a kid in the bathroom and by the time they came out the old man was no where in sight.  Still.  I'm still incredibly irritated when I think about it.

Later that night we stopped at a rest stop.  While Zac was waiting for the rest of us to come out, he climbed a tree.  His cell phone was falling out of his pocket while he was climbing so he took it out of his pocket and put it in the trunk of the tree.  We were quite a ways down the road when he realized that his phone was still in that tree trunk.  We were trying to decide what to do.  The phone wasn't that expensive and we could have bought him another one when we got to St. Louis.  But he started freaking out because he had all his contacts and pictures in that phone.  I'm a softy when it comes to pictures.  We couldn't remember how long we had been driving but we estimated it had been about 30 minutes.  So we decided we would turn around and go get it.  Unfortunately we had to drive forward about another 15 miles to get to an exit so we could turn around ( we were in the middle of nowhere).  And then after turning around, we realized we had been driving a LOT longer than 30 minutes.  And the best part was that after we retrieved the phone we didn't have enough gas to turn around and drive forward again so we had to continue back peddling until we could find a gas station.  So we pretty much spent the entire evening traipsing back and forth across the middle of Wyoming.

This made for a super long day Saturday.  We ended up eating lunch in the middle of Nebraska which is usually where we stop overnight.  Here we are at our lunch spot.  One good thing about traveling in the Spring instead of the winter is we can picnic along the way.  We made it into St. Louis around midnight Saturday night and we have been having fun ever since.